“Young adults are feeling like they don’t have many prospects, like they have no idea what their lives will be like one or two months from now. As a result, they have the feeling they are not in charge of their own lives”, says Eveline Crone, professor Developmental neuroscience in society.
Crone is the founder of the Erasmus SYNC lab (Society, Youth & Neuroscience Connected) and as such, she and her team, are researching how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting adolescent and student welfare. They see that, since young people's lives largely revolve around making contact, they are now feeling bad since they're limited in making such contact and aren't being handed any alternatives.
We can read in Erasmus Magazine, that Professor Crone and her team wanted to dig deeper and find out what was really going on with young people in these unprecedented times. So they had 900 young people (half of them EUR-students, half of them being adolescents aged 10-18) keep a diary, so the researchers could really see what they were going through. What they discovered was that young adults are driven by a wish to go out into the world. They want to have an impact, earn respect and change society. All common character traits of young adults aged 15 to 25. And Crone says that's good, because this is the drive that society needs over and over again, but since this is what young adults are like they are being hit disproportionally hard, and this is obvious from their level of well-being.
Eveline Crone advises: ''We should probably think about it in a different way. So if we know that young adults need to be able to feel that they’re having an impact, we must help them find a way to express that need. We must learn to exercise a new kind of creativity, in which we try to focus on the things young people can do. The virus doesn’t cause young people to fall ill, so we’re asking this huge group to make an enormous sacrifice, just to be considerate to other generations. So I hope other generations will be considerate themselves and give young adults the opportunity to feel like they’re doing something useful.''
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